


Empty Picture Frame

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Implied Het, M/M, bright black heaven era, implied javey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:58:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey's lives collide</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Picture Frame

**Author's Note:**

> Whoa! I never ever thought I'd write a hunvey. Never. I guess it's time something came of my unhealthy relation to Davey Havok's intersection with my unhealthy attraction to Hunter Burgan. Still, never though it would happen. Even this way, as a function of Javey angst. Huh. I'm relieved I wrote this no matter the pairing, though, because I was starting to fear my AFI muse was broken. This is proof he lives!

Davey feels like a dead body in his suit. A corpse lacquered in ornamentation. It’s how he wants to feel. 

Death made alive by artifice. It’s a better way to feel than a living thing made invisible by artifice. This way, he is invisible, but there is nothing to see anyway, so it doesn’t feel like a lie inside of a lie, just a lie. A lie alone could almost be the truth. 

He’s thinking too much for how loud it is here. The music pulses, makes his fingers twitch along with the beat even though he’s not sure he’s ever heard this remix before, and under the music there’s the steady rage of voices high and tinny, laughing and shouting. There are lot of girls here wearing things that glitter. Glitter on girls, glitter on glasses, glasses full of fizzing things, green things, clear things. Under the sweat and smoke-machine smell, there’s the smell of alcohol. It’s a comforting smell to Davey, because it’s something he can comfortably never have. Something that is not his, never was his, never will be. It’s black and white, while he swims in his forever soup of faded grays. 

People know his name here. Some friends, though mostly friends of friends and fans and friends of fans. They flit around him, sharp and electric with nerves, alcohol, bass. He’s smiling and gesturing with his hands, because it is remarkable what ornamentation can do to a dead man. Dolce and Gabana suit jacket and slacks. Paul Stuart pocket square. Belt by Michael Bastian. Tie by Polo Ralph Lauren (pastels are even polo-in right now). Ermenegildo Zegna Couture loafers, two hundred dollars more than he paid for his first car. Davey’s smiles are that rich. Billion dollar smiles, full smiles eye crinkles and all. He can even fake the eye crinkles. 

Naturally, he is the only sober person at this party. Birthday party, friend of a friend’s birthday. She’s turning twenty seven. He already kissed her cheek, squeezed her palm, dropped another billion on a for-the-birthday-girl smile. Now he’s leaning against a round black table while people talk at him and he nods, answers on autopilot, eyes darting over shoulders to scout out places he can be alone on the dance floor. He’s thinking too much, but not about what anyone is saying. He feels the back of his head to make sure his hair is still standing up. Sometimes it melts in the club humidity. 

He’s already caught sight of imaginary-Jade twice tonight. Two times is an acceptable number. Whenever he goes somewhere Jade might show up (though Jade shows up less and less these days now that he has those legal documents and a girlfriend who’s now a wife at home,) he sees him, whether or not he’s actually there. Skirting across the edges of his vision like a ghost, the shape of Jade, the smell of Jade’s expensive cologne he’s worn for the last seven years, the bend of his shoulders or the slouch in his lower back. Davey will imagine him for a moment, then he’ll be gone. He’ll come back once, maybe twice if Davey’s running on less than four hours sleep in the last 24. It’s normal. He’s used to it. It’s what happens when you’re haunted. 

Out on the floor under the lights, where bodies thrum and weave together like some wet-warm dirty single celled organism, Davey catches sight of an elbow that looks like Jade’s. He blinks. It goes away. People around him talk, shout against the music. He shouts back. Eventually they leave, clap him on the back and it’s smiles plastered on like paper-mache and then he shifts his lean from the table to a wall in the dark, fingers dancing blindly over the J contacts in his phone. He often does this. He rarely calls. 

Davey feels a body come up alongside him, press its back into the wall inches away from his own. He braces himself for the inevitability of this person talking to him, asking him for something. The voice that comes out is not the one he’s expecting. 

Knuckles press against his upper arm, under the ball of his shoulder and into Dolce and Gabana pastel sports jacket. His eyes fly open at the words “Fancy seeing you here.” It’s Hunter. He does a double take. 

Hunter and Davey don’t really share social circles, and when they do run into each other it isn’t anything worth stopping whatever they’re doing for. They’ll nod to one another, smile, then move on. Davey and Hunter are friends, sure, but not really outside of the band. It’s easy, amiable, comfortable. But it’s not like Davey calls Hunter at two am and drives haggard to his apartment to sleep on his pull out couch and familiar tear-blotched pillow like he does Adam. It’s not like his world orbits and ends around him, like it does Jade. 

But now Davey knows he isn’t the only sober person in the room anymore. “Hey!” he answers, surprising himself by reaching out, hugging Hunter, chest expanding with relief. Relief isn’t an important emotion, and it isn’t a particularly strong one, but the fact that Davey feels anything at all in this moment, or any moment on a night like this, seems strange. He holds his hand over his heart, coughs. “I didn’t know you knew Amy.” 

Hunter shrugs, leaning against the wall. He’s as underdressed as Davey is over dressed in jeans and his favorite faded black denim jacket, a threadbare teeshirt underneath. “Yeah, we’re not close or anything. I know Marie, though. Really well.” 

“Marie,” Davey says, nodding, a face, some friend of Amy’s, hazy in his memory. “I see.” 

They gaze at the dance floor, and Davey is waiting for Hunter to clap him on the shoulder again and tell him to have a good night, he’ll catch up with him later, but Hunter doesn’t. They stand together, solitary islands of unimpaired judgement in the middle of a swirling mess of drunk people. Hunter says, “So. How are you,” and Davey flinches. 

Then he laughs. Humorless, dry. He realizes that in this whole room, Hunter is the only sober one, but on top of that, he is the only one who shares anything more than Davey’s recent history. He’s been around in Davey’s life longer than any of these kids, with their glittering glasses and painted nails and bare backs. He’s real, something from Davey’s reality, rather than his artifice. It shouldn’t remind Davey that his heart is still beating in spite of the Dolce and Gabana, but it does. “I’m fine. But this is weird,” he says. He thinks of Jade, even though Jade is not here. 

“What’s weird?” Hunter asks, one eyebrow quirked over a pale blue eye. “This,” he says, and gestures to the space between he and Davey, black and toxic. “Or this,” he adds, opening up his arm to include the whole room, the bar and the screaming and the heavy dub distortion coming from the speakers. 

Davey shrugs. “Both, I guess. I don’t see you around as much as everyone else.” 

“Yeah,” Hunter shrugs again. He keeps leaning into Davey’s ear, so they can talk and it can be heard over the rage of sound around them. It’s strange, to have Hunter’s breath on his ear. In some ways it feels like home, if home is his real self, his self as a singer, a musician, a part of AFI and a part of Jade. It makes sense, he supposes, because Hunter is a part of AFI, too. In this room, Hunter is the closest thing to Jade. Davey closes his eyes, and tilts into the warmth of this other body which is saying, “Not at things like this. I don’t love things like this.” 

“Neither do I,” Davey admits. “But I do them. I have my reasons.” 

“You never were the type of guy to do things without a reason,” Hunter says. Davey’s eyes slide shut again, the flutter of sober breath on his ear distractingly real. The opposite of artifice. “Are you gonna stay all night? Break it down on the dance floor?” Hunter asks, elbow pressing into Davey’s side. 

Davey shakes his head, forgetting how familiar and safe it felt to be dead. “No. I was, but I can’t remember why now.”

Hunter laughs, “I hope I had nothing to do with that.” 

“Nothing direct,” Davey says, mouth too close to Hunter’s ear and he’s not sure what’s happening but it’s definitely not what he would have expected given this scenario on paper. .“Just...you know when you have multiple lives, and multiple selves, and things that exist only in each life that don’t ever intersect?” 

Hunter shakes his head. “No. I’m just Hunter. All the time.” He grins, because he’s lying. Anyone who claims to be anything but artificial, anyone who claims reality, who pretends they’re not afraid of what other people think about them, is a liar. Hunter and Davey smile together, teeth white and eyes sad because they live in the same universe some of the time and they know how padded with lies that universe is. It’s no secret that Hunter is lonely. Every goddamn person on the planet is lonely. 

“Anyway. You. Being here. Feels weird, like two of my lives coming together in ways I didn’t expect. It shouldn’t feel like this, but it does. I’m just having an off night, I guess.” Davey shrugs. “Plus, I don’t feel like dancing tonight. That’s one of my reasons for why I do this. Dancing. If it’s not there, then why bother?” 

“Impeccable logic,” Hunter says, nodding. “Hey Dave. I was gonna head out, but if you want some undancy and undrunk company, we could go back to my apartment. I feel like it’s been forever since we talked about anything.” 

Davey’s stomach shouldn’t drop. It shouldn’t curl into something misshapen and miserable. Shaped by Jade’s teeth and fists, forever longing for something to slip into the void left by old wounds. Hunter is not that thing, Hunter can give him nothing and on top of that, he doesn’t _want_ anything from Hunter. But Jade’s not here, and Hunter is. Jade is a ghost Davey sees every day, Hunter is a man he sees every few months. But he is the closest thing he has to home right now. “That would be really nice,” he says, and his voice is weak, his eyes dark. Hunter gives him a weird look, like he knows something is fucked up about Davey, but then again Hunter has always known something is fucked up about Davey because he’s a part of the band. He’s played behind the words written in Davey’s blood as many times as Jade has. 

Hunter’s voice sticks as he says “Cool.” 

They leave the club, Hunter leading, Davey following a few feet behind in such a way it might not even look like they’re leaving together. Davey’s heart beats the whole way.

\---

After an hour or so, the strangeness of never having been in Hunter’s apartment wears off and Davey stops thinking about what kind of person it makes him to have never visited this place. Hunter doesn’t mention it; he gets Davey a diet coke and sits at his kitchen table with his shoes kicked up onto the counter and talks. They talk easily. After all, they are old friends. 

It’s a humble apartment. Art and instruments on the walls the only things that bely Hunter has as much money as Davey does. Everything else is quiet and usual, carpet and linoleum and two bedrooms, one bath. It reminds Davey of the places they all used to live in, dumps with low ceilings and drywall. Hunter puts on Jets to Brazil, another thing that reminds Davey of years ago. 

The strangeness of never having been in Hunter’s apartment wears off. The strangeness of Hunter’s connection to Jade, however distal and fractured it is, does not. Davey sips his soda and it burns in the emptiness of his stomach, his eyes flickering with some lost darkness he uses night-darkness to chase away. “I feel drunk on not being drunk,” he says at some point, Hunter bending at the waist to laugh at him, that same darkness clouding the clear blue for a moment. Davey’s breath hitches. 

“Yeah,” Hunter eventually chokes out, shaking his head. “I do too.” 

The conversation inevitably snakes its way to the other guys. It’s common ground. They move to Hunter’s couch, crack open two more sodas, and then, “Have you seen Jade lately? You must. Working on Blaqk Audio and all that, you probably never get a break from the guy.” 

Davey can feel his face getting pale around the edges, hot in the middle. He laughs that dry laugh again, drags his palm over the stubble of his jaw. “I see him. Not as often as you might think, though. A lot of the Blaqk Audio correspondence happens via email.” 

Hunter nods. “None of that locked up for days alone with each other in a hotel room stuff you usually do for AFI?” 

Davey shakes his head. “Jade has a life that doesn’t...” he stops himself. “No. Not for Blaqk Audio.”

They’re quiet for awhile, and Davey thinks what the hell. “Do you think it’s weird we’ve never fucked before?” 

Hunter’s eyes get wide, these chasms of ice surrounding points of flint-black. “You mean you and I, because you can’t mean you and Jade. Unless you do mean you and Jade, in which case I’ve been missing something very big for the last ten years.” 

Davey laughs, shakes his head. His hand crawls up the back of his neck to the crown of his head, where he feels that his hair has started to fall down. “No. You and I, obviously.” 

Hunter’s silence isn’t awkward as much as it is thoughtful. Eventually he says, “No, not really. Why would it be weird? I mean, if we haven’t then we haven’t. There must be a reason.” 

Davey nods. “No, I didn’t think it was weird, until tonight. Lots of things feel weird. Like, why have I never been to your apartment?” 

“You just haven’t. You never needed to, the opportunity just never arose, or something.” Hunter sets his soda can down on the coffee table where there are month-old guitar and electronic music magazines. Davey thinks he’s the only member of the band who doesn’t get music magazine subscriptions. That seems weird too. “I’m not offended, if you’re worried,” Hunter adds. 

“I’m not worried. I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be unfortunate if I had sex with more people I didn’t like than with people I did.” 

“Do you make a habit of having sex with people you don’t like?” Hunter asks. 

Davey cocks his head, thinks about it. “I like sex more than I like people. So you can imagine what kind of situations that leads to.” Things should be tight and uncomfortable between them; Hunter should be acting like Davey just came on to him unexpectedly after knowing him for most of his life. But Davey doesn’t want to fuck Hunter. And he didn’t come onto him. He doesn’t think he did, anyway. Not entirely. 

Hunter nods. “I like sex, too. But not enough to cancel out how much I dislike the people I dislike.” 

“Fair,” Davey tells him. “I was just thinking, though. I like you, you’re attractive. It’s not like you’ve never fucked other guys before. We’re friends. It just seems strange we’ve never had sex given other people who have less going for them who I’ve had sex with.” His cheeks are getting warmer and warmer, and it occurs to him that he’s just crossed a very serious line with a professional partner of his. He cards a hand through his hair, not caring anymore if it stays intact. “I’m sorry.” 

Hunter cuts a hand lazily through the air in front of them. Davey catches sight of a clock and sees it’s well after one am. “What are you sorry for?” Hunter asks.

“This conversation.” 

“Don’t be. You’ve talked to me about weirder things.” 

Davey is unsure of which weirder things he’s spoken to Hunter about. He rubs his face with both palms, crawling with physical numbness while his insides writhe with feeling, the hot, boiling feeling of everything in his life being connected to Jade, a million deltas and streams feeding back to the same fierce river. 

“Maybe we’ve never fucked because our friendship isn’t like that. Or we’re not sexually attracted to each other. Or, we’re in a band together,” Hunter proposes. “How about that one?” 

“Never stopped me before,” Davey says, voice cold. The silence hangs between them like a blanket of snow, white and reflective and suffocating. 

Hunter clears his throat after awhile. “Maybe we never fucked because of Jade.” 

Davey sits back, hands still on his face, neck lolling against Hunter’s couch pillows. “It’s late,” he says, voice muffled. 

“Yeah,” Hunter replies. Davey listens to the sound of him finishing his soda, then setting the can down with a muted clatter. He coughs, then says “Dave, are you propositioning me?” 

Davey snorts. “I don’t know. I’m fucked up.” 

“Drunk on not being drunk?” 

“Yeah.” 

The quiet again, the feeling of Davey’s skin being too tight. Too tight and too full of Jade’s scars, Jade’s bruises, the distant ache of seeing Jade’s ghost. Davey tries to remember the last time he held Jade down and fucked him, and is shocked to realize it’s only been a few weeks. It seems like so much longer. It’s the kind of thing he long for with such a starving ferocity when he doesn’t have it, but more than a few days with it poisons him. Swallows him up, interferes with his ability to breathe. This is why living as a dead man works for Davey. Long stretches of painted death, punctuated by Jade and Jade’s poison. There are worse ways to live. 

There is Hunter, next to him, with musicians hands and clever eyes and knowledge of Davey that Jade has. Hunter knows the smell of his sweat. The way his voice sounds when it’s giving out. The way his face changes when he’s singing on his knees in front of Jade. It’s not everything, but it’s more than something, and Davey isn’t even faced with more than something on most days. Just artifice. He takes a deep breath. 

“Would you?” He asks. 

“What? Have sex with you?” Hunter responds. His voice sounds like it’s coming from a dry throat. 

“Yes.”

Hunter holds his breath, then lets it out in a defeated puff. “I don’t know. Maybe if we lived in a vacuum. But we don’t. There’s the band, and Jade. And everything else.” 

Davey waves his hand, dispelling everything else because nothing else matters save for the fact he feels alive right now. Fleetingly, desperately, but still. Alive. He puts his hand over his heart. “I don’t think sleeping with you would change anything.” 

He opens his eyes, letting his gaze fall on Hunter, who looks like he wants to say _thanks, Dave_ with sarcasm, humor, something to shatter the tension between them. Instead he just sits there wavering, looking stricken. Davey reaches for him, and he winces away. 

“No,” Davey says, hand shaking as he reaches further, through his own loneliness and into Hunter’s “Let me. It’ll be good.” 

“I’m sure it will, but--”

“But what?” Davey’s voice is nothing but a scrape, and Hunter looks lost, black pushing out all the blue in his eyes. A pillar of lonely. _“What?”_ Davey begs.

Hunter’s face is screwed up like Davey’s hurting him, but he doesn’t shove him off, he doesn’t make any move to push Davey away, doesn’t say a word. He rests his hands on Davey’s shoulder, and strips him stoically, clinically, of layers. Dolce and Gabana. Paul Stuart. Ralph Lauren. Michael Bastian. Davey’s mouth is on Hunter’s neck, tongue scraping across stubble, tasting salt and the bitter clean of soap, until Hunter thumbs his chin up so their lips notch together, kissing. 

Neither says a single thing. Hunter’s fingers under Davey’s tie, loosening it, palming over his chest tentatively but not fearfully, firmly but not hungrily. It’s nothing like Jade’t touch, but the knowledge that those hands are guitar-string roughed, that those hands have touched the things that Jade’s touched and are now touching him, is enough. Davey’s hard for Jade, pressed into Hunter. Hips working against the squeak of denim. He wonders who Hunter’s thinking of, and knows it’s not him. 

Time passes. Eventually, between Hunter’s knees, Davey swallows and it’s a familiar taste. Hunter’s boneless on his couch, one leg tossed over Davey’s shoulder, lithe chest rising and falling, catching moonlight on its white planes of muscle. Davey wipes his mouth with a tremulous wrist. He’s comforted by slowing of his heart, the fading reminder of his mortality.

He shrugs his jacket on, combs his fingers through his hair, and falls into the familiar silence of artifice. Silently he replaces each layer, dying all the while.


End file.
